Yesterday’s Acquisitions

Yesterday my father and I went to an auction of books and documents and prints and things. Because of the financial crisis, people weren’t bidding as high as expected, but even so the children’s books I was interested in buying were out of my reach. We did manage to get a folio of Japanese watercolors my mother wanted, though, and we bid on something signed by King James I, mostly because nobody else was, and it would have been kind of awesome if we had won.

But not getting anything at the auction gave me an excuse to buy a book of drawings by Charles Dana Gibson — The Social Ladder — that I’d been looking at last weekend. It’s in terrible condition — it’s literally falling apart — but the drawings themselves are intact, even if the pages they’re on aren’t completely. And I got it for less than half of the lowest price I’ve found online. And then I bought a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Life, Letters and Journals, which I initially thought was signed by Alcott, but which in fact just has a facsimile signature below her photograph on the frontispiece. Fortunately, I was neither very surprised nor disappointed, and I’m still pretty pleased about the price I got it for.

The woman in the store where I bought both books also threw in a 60s paperback by Viola Rowe called Freckled and Fourteen. I plan on posting about all three books in depth, and if I can manage it, I’d like to photograph and post the whole of the Gibson book.

New acquisitions.

The camp where my brother works has a lot of old children’s books. My brother told me about it a while back, but I didn’t see it until yesterday, when my parents and I drove him up to Maine. Most of the books are in terrible condition, but there’s some really excellent stuff. The camp director let me pick out some to take, and I am going to replace them with newer books.

I got an Alger I didn’t have — Frank Hunter’s Peril — Three Dana Girls mysteries (that’s a Stratemeyer series that began in the mid thirties), and Slippy McGee, by Marie Conway Oemler. I was so excited when I saw the latter that I think I squeaked.

I have a copy of Slippy McGee! I can’t wait to reread it.

New Old Books

This weekend I was upstate with my family, and on Saturday we visited a used book store that my parents like a lot but where I’ve never found anything particularly interesting. I was about to not find anything interesting again this time, but while I was looking around the little room where they keep the children’s books, one of the store owners — I think — came into the room to get something out of the closet. I looked over his shoulder and saw piles and piles of exactly the kinds of books I wanted, mostly boys’ series like Tom Swift, The Boy Scouts, and Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s boy scout books. The guy let me look through them, and with the help of my father and my brother, who are much taller than I am, I got to look through most of them.

I ended up getting six books: two Tom Swifts (the first Tom Swift — think Tom Swift’s Motorcycle rather than Tom Swift’s Jetmarine), two Fitzhughs (one Tom Slade and one Pee-Wee Harris), one trashy looking women’s novel with nice illustrations and a main character named Sybil, and The Golden Boys in the Maine Woods.

I’ve just finished reading the latter. I am about to post about it, but I can’t figure out how to post two Flickr photos at once, so…